Middle Management Blues

I promised some time back to come up with a list, so after some rumination I’ve come up with some possibilities. Feel free to suggest some more and we’ll do this again… The micro-manager. Yes, the ever-popular micro-manager, guaranteed to make your life a living hell. Ordinarily does not allow anyone else to make a decision. If you do make one, it will get over-analyzed and thrown back in your face repeatedly (especially if it turned out badly). MMs work their butts off because they have to. The mis-informationistas. This is a branch off the lying-bastard family tree. A mis-informationista is too sly to come out and tell a whopper. They prefer the backdoor. One might suggest to your manager that they saw you come in from lunch an hour late, but neglect to say that they saw you leave for lunch an hour late. The “There’s no ‘me’ in team (except ME)”. Two facets to this person – a) must be on every team, and if you leave them off they fuss, and b) they claim 100% of t...

I’m not a big Talking Heads fan, but this part of "Life During Wartime" is one of my favorite lyrics of all time: I’ve changed my hairstyle So many times now I don’t know what I look like. If you remember the post from a few weeks back about consultants, then you will understand how this snippet fits in to a blog about business and middle management. There is a little more to it than that, but it is at the core of one of our problems. My first job out of college was at a plant that was part of a public company but two families owned a majority of the shares. One family ran the business, and the other controlled the board. It had been that way for decades. Things there did not change – you could set your clock by the CEO’s trips to the cafeteria to smoke his Nicaraguan cigars. All promotions were from the inside. If you cut your teeth in one area of the plant it was unusual to take a promotion to another area. In a word, the place was inbred. In some ways it ...

You may have a non-fictional pointy-haired boss who says stuff that he hears the big bosses say because he (or she) has no imagination, or maybe no grasp of the American version of English. As a public service, I’m here to help. If you have some more, please feel free to add them to the comments section at the bottom of this post. Sense of Urgency What they think it means – Employees get the stuff done that the bosses want before their boss asks for it. What we think it means – Spend nights and weekends getting something done that will likely sit on the boss’s desk for several days before they even look at it (and then they will misunderstand it so badly they will ask us to re-write it several days after that). What it should mean – The manager very specifically requests a task is completed, giving an exact deadline sometime in the near future, giving it a priority over all over work for that individual or team, and providing the resources required to get it done. Weasel alert...

The most amazing thing happened this week. My boss was fired. It wasn’t a shot from the blue, because he’d done some stupid things. He wasn’t exactly a favorite of his boss. If you’ve read many of these little musings you might have gathered that he wasn’t very good at his job. He wasn’t, but he had some good qualities. He was a serious micromanager, and like many from that work-weasel phylum, he had to work his butt off to keep up. I respected him for the hours he put in. When he put his mind to it he was very prepared and he was knowledgeable about key subjects. I feel badly for him because he was a decent person when you got him out of the “boss” persona. I feel great for me because he was a terrible boss and it was only a matter of time before his boss persona truly screwed up my career. There is a group of a half-dozen managers who really guide the happenings in the plant: the big boss, obviously; the HR manager; the operations manager; the maintenance manager; the ma...